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Artigo
Epistemologies of the South Meet the Insurrectionist Turn in Pragmatism: Steps Towards A Dialogue
João Arriscado Nunes
Pragmatism Today
2021-09-11

Recent debates within pragmatist philosophy are creating new openings for encounters and dialogues with alternative epistemologies and approaches to themes at the core of classical pragmatism. This article addresses some of the questions raised by what has been described as the “insurrectionist” challenge to pragmatism, exploring their convergence with the research program of Epistemologies of the South which grew out of the work of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Santos’s proposal of a postabyssal philosophy draws, among other sources and influences, on an appropriation of contributions of pragmatist philosophy for a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of epistemology. This paper offers a discussion of selected topics of import to an ongoing exploration of the affinities, resonances and differences between the postabyssal conception of knowledges born out of struggle that underpins the project of Epistemologies of the South, on the one hand, and emerging “insurrectionist” versions or pragmatism, which extend and radicalize classical pragmatism, on the other, as well as possible paths to future dialogues.

Keywords: Epistemologies of the South; insurgent pragmatism; postabyssal thinking; Paulo Freire

Introduction
Recent debates within pragmatism are creating new openings for encounters and dialogues with alternative epistemologies and approaches to themes at the core of classical pragmatism. The field broadly and commonly described as postcolonial studies offers a fertile ground for the exploration of those themes, including experience, knowledge and ignorance, community, democracy or justice. The actual and potential contributions of philosophical pragmatism to these debates, however,are often ignored, trivialized, or even assigned a pejorative trait associated with a reading of pragmatism as a peculiarly (North) American brand of instrumentalism or opportunism, or as part of a broader, post-analytic constellation of positions. This article proposes a different approach, which addresses some of the questions raised by what has been described as the “insurrectionist” challenge to pragmatism, exploring their convergence with the research program of Epistemologies of the South which grew out of the work of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Santos’s proposal of a postabyssal philosophy – an “alternative thinking of alternatives” (Santos, 2007a) - draws, among other sources and influences, on an appropriation of contributions of pragmatist philosophy for a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of epistemology (Santos, 2007a, 2014; Nunes, 2009). It would be an impossible task to address the broad range of questions of relevance to that dialogue within the limits of this article. The aim is, more modestly, to provide a discussion of selected topics of import to an ongoing exploration of the affinities, resonances and differences between the postabyssal conception of knowledges born out of struggle that underpins the project of Epistemologies of the South, on the one hand, and emerging “insurrectionist” versions or pragmatism, which extend and radicalize classical pragmatism, on the other. This means that some topics will have to be briefly addressed, and left for further discussion in future publications. >READ FULL ARTICLE



Conteúdo Original por Pragmatism Today